Monday, February 6, 2012

Up 'til now, almost all of my travel has been for study. I went to Egypt to study Arabic and Middle Eastern Politics and culture, and then I went to Chile to improve my Spanish. now, however, I'll be teaching.
While teaching and learning are certainly not opposites in my mind, it does definitely bring a new perspective to my travels, and that brings me to what I hope to learn this year: how to travel without being dependent on someone/ a program. Yes, I will be part of a school, where my boss will hopefully not throw me to the non-English speaking wolves, but In the past, all of my major travels have either been to places where I either speak the language or have a program or a good friend to help me along.
Going in to this, all I have is myself and a few people I've exchanged emails with. While I have certainly had some wild and unexpected travel experiences in the past, I have, in general, had either the language skills (for example, when I was robbed in Spain) or the personal support network (say, during the revolution in Cairo) to deal with it. I certainly hope that I will soon be making new friends in Korea, and that I will not be able to say for long that I have no support system there, but for now, the self-reliance I am forcing myself into is my giant learning hurdle at present. I think it will be a great learning experience.

This has been week three of Bootsnall's challenge, prompt:
Have you ever studied or taken classes on a trip? What did you study, and perhaps more importantly, what did you learn while on that trip? What would you like to learn on your travels this year?

Sunday, February 5, 2012

I posted recently about some thoughts I have on the Egyptian Revolution one year later, and it made me think of something else that has been bothering me recently, also in Egypt. On Wednesday, a riot broke out in Port Said after underdog El Masry beat Cairo's Al Ahly on the football pitch. 74 people lost their lives. Seventy-four people.
A friend of mine recently posted this from MSNBC's World Blog by Ayman Mohyeldin, a reporter who I specifically remember for his reporting from Tahrir Square during the revolution on the only English-language station available in Cairo, Al-Jazeera English. Mohyeldin provided excellent coverage then, and I continue to trust his reporting and opinions since his move to NBC.

I could not agree more with Mohyeldin's point: Egyptians have grown too accustomed to pointing fingers and the country cannot move forward at this critical point in its existence if its people are so divided. Egyptians are divided by religion, by soccer allegiances, by class. While religious beliefs and level of wealth are likely to influence one's political beliefs, allowing so many things to divide a society will only make it more difficult to elect a representative government.
Wednesday's events have led to even more finger-pointing, and as Mohyeldin points out, those fingers are being pointed at the government and at security forces, whose inaction is being labeled as complicity in the violence. I hate to be cliche, but you know that saying "for every finger you point, three point back at you?" Well, this seems to be a perfect example of that. Egyptians are to blame for what happened, those who stormed the field, those who threw things, those who hit and killed their fellow countrymen, over a soccer match. I understand that sporting events are contentious, rowdy events, and soccer is known to have some of the most ridiculous crowd actions, but these Egyptians were hitting their fellow Egyptians. Egyptians are to blame.
Much of what I just said is a reiteration of what Mohyeldin has said in his article, so I would like to finish with something I also posted separately, but was also inspired by this article.

Is this what you want for your country, ya masr?
You made history last year, ya masr, Egypt, you took to the streets and did not leave, send they camels or tanks or snipers, until Hosni Mubarak had stepped down. You want to have a say in your government, ya masr, and the first thing you had to say was erhal, leave. There were many times when you weren't sure you were being heard, ya masr, but you did not go home. For two and a half weeks you lived in tents in Tahrir, ya masr, being tear gassed and shot at, creating your own hospital to treat the wounded. Then, horreya, freedom, ya masr, or so we all hoped, but SCAF seems to have other plans. The problem, though, ya masr, is that you also have some of the blame for your county's lack of unity. You have allowed yourselves to become divided over so many things, ya masr, and you have let them take advantage of you. There are so many things that you agree on, ya masr, but you have divided yourselves over soccer, over religious beliefs, over so many issues that you forget that you are all the same shabab, people, who stood together for what you believe. You chant ta7ia masr, long live Egypt, but you will fall apart, ya masr, if you do not stand together.

Is this what you want for your country, ya masr?
You made history last year, ya masr, Egypt, you took to the streets and did not leave, send they camels or tanks or snipers, until Hosni Mubarak had stepped down. You want to have a say in your government, ya masr, and the first thing you had to say was erhal, leave. There were many times when you weren't sure you were being heard, ya masr, but you did not go home. For two and a half weeks you lived in tents in Tahrir, ya masr, being tear gassed and shot at, creating your own hospital to treat the wounded. Then, horreya, freedom, ya masr, or so we all hoped, but SCAF seems to have other plans. The problem, though, ya masr, is that you also have some of the blame for your county's lack of unity. You have allowed yourselves to become divided over so many things, ya masr, and you have let them take advantage of you. There are so many things that you agree on, ya masr, but you have divided yourselves over soccer, over religious beliefs, over so many issues that you forget that you are all the same shabab, people, who stood together for what you believe. You chant ta7ia masr, long live Egypt, but you will fall apart, ya masr, if you do not stand together.

Read more about the Port Said riot and my inspiration for this post here.

I wrote this about a month ago and never got around to posting it because a large chunk of it was deleted accidentally and I haven't been able to really re-write it as I'd like to, but I really enjoyed writing it and the theme it has, so here goes:

Living in the United States means one thing for travel - the virtual necessity of airplanes. But this is only because we have been programmed to feel that if they don't speak a different language, have radically different customs, then they are not worth traveling to.
I've come to think quite a bit recently about what it means to travel. I have been very preoccupied recently with getting abroad to teach English. Part of my motivation for this was certainly the excellent money that can be made abroad teaching versus domestic teaching salaries, but in a recent drive of approximately 1700 miles from New Orleans, LA, to southern Maine, I have realized that there is so much traveling to do right here in the good ol' US of A.
In three days of crazy rush to make it home for my mother's birthday, I drove right past so many things I would have loved to have had the time to stop and explore, experience, photograph. This country is beautiful. And more than I ever realized (though I knew it, factually), incredibly varied. Even better than an EU passport or a Schengen Visa, I don't even need to speak to a boarder guard to change states here.
Much of the mystique is taken away by the fact that these places cannot, in fact, be labelled "foreign," the locals all speak English, though the accent may be different; The blessing of a lack of border crossing works against us to make us feel we are not traveling. But think about it. The food is different. The sites are certainly different. Many of the laws may change. A different state - or especially region - is different (I know, right??).
Don't get me wrong, I'm moving to asia in a month and a half: I fully comprehend the dazzle involved in something completely foreign. I do not speak Korean, I don't know much about Korean food, I'm doing my best to learn about the culture, and I'm terrified. And I love it.
For many (most?) United Statesians who consider themselves world travelers, the thought of being stranded stateside for an extended period of time means a suspension of travel, but we are blessed with most of a continent to explore, with only a bus/train/whatever ticket. No passport required. When you're feeling blue and travel-deprived, take a drive, hop on a bus, there's all kinds of great stuff to be seen right down the highway.

When I left Cairo a year ago, I was disappointed that I had to leave but I was willing to accept a small setback in my life because it could have meant so many amazing things for the lives of millions of Egyptians. But now I am just disappointed; in the year since I left, I have not seen the change that I had so much hope for, crying in front of my laptop at the news of Mubarak's resignation from the safety of my mother's house in Maine. That hope is still strong, I would say it is stronger with me than with many of my friends wh were not there, but I am disappointed.
The new constitution is being written under military rule, presidential elections are impossibly far away even still. This site (I love Al-Jazeera)has a nice little graphic of what's actually been accomplished since the revolution, and it's disheartening, but I have seen what Egyptians can do with my own eyes, and I think it is important that we not let the revolution become a thing of the past in our minds: it is still ongoing. If we forget that, this revolution, touted as the figurehead of the Arab Spring, will not usher in a new age of democracy in the Middle East but rather a transition from one authoritarian regime to another, but this time those in charge can claim that they are what the people want, since they were brought to power by the revolution.